From Solar Orbiter to the East, here are the guardians of the Earth

From the Solar Orbiter to the European Solar Telescope (East): here are the guardians of the Earth, some of the main space missions born to study our star and protect us from the dangers of solar storms. It is one of the themes at the center of the conference that took place today in Rome at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei in which we talked about how the Sun influences our lives every day.

From climate to telecommunications to the disaster of the Italian airship: the Sun is at the center of any form of life on the planet and affects our lives on a daily basis. Our star and its impact on the earth’s environment were at the center of the conference that took place today in Rome at the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei.

“Without the Sun, life on Earth would be simply impossible, the most important source of energy and light would be the faint glow of the Milky Way”, explained Francesco Berrilli, of Tor Vergata University and member of the Commission for the environment and large natural disasters of the Lincei. Source of energy and life support but at the same time also one of the greatest dangers for man and beyond. For just a few decades we have been getting to know the innermost details of our star, an extremely variable object whose activity is constantly evolving, “discovering how in the past extremely powerful solar storms occurred with a cadence of centuries or millennia and that if they happened today they would have effects. potentially catastrophic for our high-tech society, “added Berrilli.
Precisely for this reason, space missions such as NASA’s Solar Probe or the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter (ESA) and future telescopes such as the European Solar Telescope (EST) were born. True guardians of the planet capable of detecting and predicting possible catastrophic storms.

Solar activities can also have surprising effects, as in the case of the disastrous adventure of the airship Italia which took place in the Arctic in 1928: an epic adventure that ended with numerous victims, a toll that was worsened precisely by a solar storm that occurred in those days. , recalled Bruno Zolesi of the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology (Ingv), who made it impossible to intercept requests for help sent by radio.

If our planet lives in a rather ‘stable’ equilibrium we also owe it to another object, much smaller but very close: the Moon. Underlining the physical characteristics, Alessandra Celletti of the Tor Vergata University explained how the presence of our satellite keeps the inclination of the Earth’s axis stable and consequently acts as a fundamental climate stabilizer.

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Source From: Ansa

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